REFLECTION:
Following the completion of the last ALM 102 assignment I felt that I had already told the story I wanted to tell in regards to reality. Therefore, I decided to changed my point of focus to surveillance, and particularly the necessity of maintaining a balanced perspective when understanding the role of surveillance in modern society. With this video project we were required to find at least two scholarly sources to use within our video. Since one of the key messages I wanted to convey in my video was concerning the pros and cons of surveillance, I decided it would be most appropriate finding one source highlighting the negatives of surveillance and one source highlighting the benefits of surveillance. We had briefly covered Michel Foucault’s philosophy on surveillance within this unit but I had also covered Foucault’s studies in more depth in my Criminology unit, when we covered surveillance. Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish was thus one of my main sources I used to convey a cynical perspective on surveillance. However, Discipline and Punish was published in 1975 and another key message I wanted to convey with this video was how modern society should approach surveillance. Thus, I felt like I something that would reflect and link Foucault’s philosophy of surveillance to the modern era. This led me to the YouTube channel Surveillance Camera Man, an anonymous filmmaker who post controversial videos were he simply films strangers in the public space without their approval. While his videos are undoubtedly wrong and a clear invasion of privacy, they helped demonstrate the way society has become completely complacent to the presence of CCTV cameras in the public space and only realise that they are being watched when a camera is obviously in their face. Finally, I needed a scholarly source which emphasizes the benefits of surveillance so I once again used resources from criminology and found a research study involving the effectiveness of CCTV footage that had some strong statistics which I could use to help highlight the potential benefits of surveillance.
While I was still in the research stage of production for this video, I made sure to try and capture examples of surveillance throughout my everyday life, as I planned to use this as overlay for my video. This actually helped me realise how omnipresent surveillance is within our lives as I was easily able to get footage of speeding camera, CCTV cameras at Deakin and CCTV camera at supermarkets which were all later used as overlay in my video. At this time in ALM102 we were discussing micro-videos and Adam suggested that it could be a good idea to start Assessment 3 with a micro-video before getting into it. Inspired by this idea I decided to make a Tik Tok/Vine style skit about the FBI watching people through their laptop cameras expect this time a guy somehow realises there watching. After that a wrote up a basic outline from a script were, I started off cynical towards surveillance and then ended with an optimistic but cautionary perspective. Although a majority of my video would likely be voiceover with overlay, I still decided to set my tripod and camera up and film myself speaking to the camera show I had the option of using the footage of myself and overlay throughout the video. When I was gathering images to use as overlay on creative commons, I found that the variety of images was fairly limited so the footage of me speaking to camera and examples of surveillance that I had filmed myself came in handy. About half way through the production of this video I decided that it could be a cool idea to conduct a little social experiment on my friends by filming them in the style of Surveillance Camera Man and seeing their reactions. Just like the examples in Surveillance Camera Man’s videos my friends inevitably started to become frustrated and uncomfortable by my filming and this helped further demonstrate how surveillance is in some ways, an invasion of privacy which we don’t realise has occurred. Furthermore, I continued to use the technique I first used in the previous Making Video assignment, in which I used text throughout my video to put great emphasis on a quote or statistic. Putting the video all together and maintaining high quality audio whilst adding background music to the video was definitely the hardest and most time-consuming part. As I had to go through 50 minutes of footage from Surveillance Camera Man’s channel to find clips that I could use in my video and also listen to 30 minutes of background music to find music I could use throughout my video. To make sure I didn’t rush the editing process I made sure to give myself plenty of time which I think really helped me ensure that I had made a satisfying video.
References:
- Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish – The Birth of Prison. Paris, France: Penguin Books Ltd.
- Australian Institute of Criminology 2017, Effectiveness of public space CCTV systems, Australia, November 2017, retrieved 17th September 2019 , <https://www.aic.gov.au>.
- Surveillance Camera Man Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg&t=910s
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